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News on GPLv3, Samba4 and poor old Daniel..

Couple of interesting things today, first off is that the first draft of the GPLv3 has been posted for comment on the FSF’s website finally, so we get to see what they’re thinking. Then we have some news on a technology preview for Samba4 and finally why you shouldn’t put off packing to the last moment, like I’m doing..
With the GPLv3 draft Groklaw has a fair bit about the license up already and I know that they’re working on a colour-coded differences page to show what’s changed. Not surprisingly both software patents and DRM have resulted in some changes for the draft, but there are also just general tidying and tightening of the language to make it less ambiguous in places.

One thing that has been noticed is that part of Section 2 (Basic Permissions) of the proposed license (remember, this is just up for consultation at the moment) says:

This License gives unlimited permission to privately modify and run the Program, provided you do not bring suit for patent infringement against anyone for making, using or distributing their own works based on the Program.

I’ve been following the Samba 4 development for a while, ever since Tridge did a talk for LUV about what they were working on (full implementation of CIFS, Windows authentication protocols, etc) and tracking their Subversion repository. I’ve even managed to get a very trivial documentation patch in (for a file that’s now gone away)! But there’s been no talk of any releases – until now.

Samba4 is rapidly growing up, and I’ve been able to put some polish on the raw technologies. For example, we now support ‘vampire’ operations from the SWAT GUI, doing the domain join and vampire in the one action. This extracts the full user database from windows and replicates it, including passwords and Kerberos attributes, into Samba4’s LDB database.